


Emancipation

by shara



Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/M, Gen, Includes mentions of rape and sexual assault.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 09:31:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4474187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shara/pseuds/shara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of strength takes a lifetime to tell. This is Lisa's story. Written for <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://14valentines.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://14valentines.livejournal.com/">14valentines</a>, a celebration of women.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emancipation

  
She’s seven years old, playing in the park when David Miller from four doors down pushes her sister and calls her a “stupid bitch.” Neither she nor her sister know what the word means but they instinctively know it’s bad. When her sister starts crying, she sees red, because no one is allowed to make her sister cry except herself, and she launches at David, tackling him down and shoving his face into the sand, screaming “ _Take it back! Take it back!_ ”

Her mother clucks at her later as she wipes rubbing alcohol into the scratches on her arms.

“You can’t do things like this, Lisa,” her mother says to her disapprovingly. “Girls are not supposed to fight like animals. You should have walked away.”

It’s the first time she hears _Don’t_ , and _You can’t_ , and she nods along to her mother’s lecture, but later, when her sister looks in admiration at her bruised knuckles, she feels a thrill of pride and thinks, _I can I can I can_.

*

As she gets older, she has to stop fighting with her fists, but she finds other methods of attack. And she’s brilliant, or at least that’s what everyone says, so she holds that knowledge to herself and curves it into sharp insults and snappy comebacks that can do almost as much damage.

“Little wise-ass, aren’t you?” her father says to her sometimes. He means to scold her but she’s secretly pleased at this new power.

School passes by in a blur of oversized clothes and petty quarrels, and hours and hours of homework. There are groups of girls in her school who giggle about boys and compare ideas about outfits but she’s not really interested, and content to let them pass her by. Then, the year she turns fourteen, John Burks passes her a note in class which says, _Will you go to the dance with me?_

Lisa writes _No_ in her careful, neat script and passes it back to him, seeing his face fall as he reads the note. She wonders then about the things those girls discuss in bathrooms and during recess, about the power of a perfect hairstyle, and a well-aimed smirk.

She’s fifteen, though, before she first looks at herself in the mirror, runs her hands over her newly-budding breasts, and thinks _beautiful_.

*

In high school, Lisa enters honors courses and learns that she’s not brilliant after all, only smart, and maybe a little more motivated than her classmates. What irritates her most is a boy in her biology class who seems to learn effortlessly, sleeping through all of their teacher’s lectures and still managing to ace the tests.

“You can’t beat him, Lisa,” her friend Amy tells her sympathetically. “He’s just too smart.”

She spends an entire week fuming over that and then throws herself at her books, reads for days, problem after problem, page after page, and somehow, unexpectedly, the words begin to come to life. She begins to hear the first few notes of a beautiful melody, a song of cells and molecules and DNA, of the processes and the mysteries of life, and the unshakable miracle of the human body. For the first time, she sees a future for herself.

The fact that she ends up graduating with the highest GPA in her class is an added bonus.

*

She likes him, the way his brown hair falls into his bright green eyes, and his little smile as he holds her close. More importantly, she likes this, the heavy weight of his arms around her, the pounding, sweaty claustrophobia of the frat-house basement, the delicious friction between them, and with the heat gathering at the base of her spine, she’s aching to be touched. So when he leans in close to her ear and asks if she wants to go somewhere else, she agrees gratefully, smiling as he pulls her along by the hand out of the crowd.

Upstairs, in his room, he doesn’t waste any time, pinning her against the door and kissing her, his hands sliding under her sweater, hot against her skin. She sucks in a breath when he grinds his hips against hers, the sensation of heat flooding through her. She kisses back hungrily as they stumble to the bed. He pushes her back on to it and climbs on top, the weight of him pressing down on her uncomfortably. She squirms to get him to shift but he doesn’t seem to notice, covering her mouth with a kiss instead and shoving her sweater up over her breasts. He pushes down the cups of her bra, making her breasts spill out with her nipples hard and dark, and says, “ _Jesus_.”

And she might have been flattered by that but he hardly pays attention to her, just buries his scratchy face in between her breasts and rubs her nipples roughly with his thumbs. It doesn’t hurt, not exactly, but it doesn’t feel good either, and suddenly she starts having second thoughts.

“Wait—” she starts to say, but he grabs her hand and brings it to the bulge in his pants, thick and throbbing, and his groan drowns out her voice.

And from there it moves _fast_. He’s unbuttoning his pants, shoving them down, pulling out his penis from within his boxers. She stares at its dark red length, at the bead of fluid shining at its tip, and a whine of panic begins to start inside her. When he reaches for the waistband of her pants, she grabs his hand and says, “I don’t want to do this.”

He stares at her, and then chuckles disbelievingly. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mutters, looking down at her. He pushes her hand away and moves back over her, saying, “It’ll be good, I promise.”

“No—no—” she says, and suddenly she realizes that he’s moved closer not to comfort her, but to trap her.

“It’s fine, just relax,” he says, but his hand is fumbling at the button of her jeans and all her good feeling, all her anticipation is gone. Her heart starts jackrabbitting inside her chest in fear.

“Get off me,” she snaps, shoving against his chest, but he doesn’t give, grabbing her hand and pressing it into the mattress, pinning her down with his legs. “I don’t want—”

“Come on—” he’s grunting, breathing heavily against her neck, holding her arms down. “—you’re hot, I’ll make it good—”

“No—”

And finally she gets her leg loose from under him and jerks her knee up, and he’s down, rolling over, hands between his legs, screaming, “ _Fuck—fucking bitch—_ ” but she’s gone, pulling her pants up and her sweater down, stumbling out the door and down the hallway, into the cool night air, until she can get as far away as possible, so she can sit down and catch her breath and stop shaking.

*

Lisa does her residency in an inner city hospital in Boston, where all the residents have to do an ER rotation regardless of their specialties. On her first day, her supervisor gives her tips on how to recognize child abuse in dislocated elbows and stories about falling down stairs, and on what to do if patients come in carrying a weapon.

“Call security,” she says firmly. “Don’t try to deal with it yourself; don’t try to be a hero; this isn’t an afterschool special.”

In her second week, a patient comes in alone a few hours after midnight, wearing jeans and an oversized sweatshirt and cries into her sleeve the whole time she sits in the ER waiting room. She looks about sixteen, though she’s written 20 on the check-in form. Lisa thinks her actual age is probably something in between. She says her name is Claire and Lisa smiles and says it’s a nice name, but Claire doesn’t respond. She’s trying to be reassuring as she opens the sterile plastic of the rape kit with her gloved fingers because Claire looks cold, alone and tiny on the exam table with her head turned to the side, eyes screwed shut. She can’t seem to stop crying, the tears leaking out from behind her closed eyelids, soaking her eyelashes and creating round, damp circles on the sheet under her.

When Lisa leans down to look at her, to take samples and record evidence, she sees that she’s bleeding, the tender area raw and red, her skin darkened with bruises all around her waist. She has to stop and take a breath then, because her hand is shaking. It’s one thing to read about assault, about tearing and force and abrasions, but it’s another thing to see a person lying open in front of her, young and hurt, all that innocence destroyed, something beautiful torn apart.

 _I’m sorry_ , she wants to say, but she doesn’t know how. She thinks back to the sensitivity classes she had to take in medical school, learning to say _I’m sorry for your loss_ or _I’m sorry you don’t have much time left_ , but no one had a class to teach her how to apologize for pain, for cruelty, for violation.

Lisa touches her as gently as she can, and tries to find her voice.

*

Sometimes she likes, with the door-blinds closed but the window-blinds wide open, to kick her feet up on her desk, lean back in her chair and _smile_ at the fact that she is in charge of this entire hospital. Second youngest dean in the country and the first woman to hold the position; the thought still fills her with pride. It’s probably sinful to gloat to herself in this way but she figures she deserves a moment of selfishness now and then.

They’ve had good ratings from the Board this year; many of her doctors have published articles in the last few months; the staff has actually been filing reports on time; their patient turnover is the best it’s ever been; and Rachel still manages to fill her with overwhelming love and make her want to rip her hair out at the same time. In short, everything in her life is perfect, except—

“I _need_ that brain biopsy,” House says, glaring down at her, looking like he’s on the edge of a tantrum. “She’s got toxoplasmosis. I can prove it, but I have to do the biopsy first.”

She’s caught them prepping for brain surgery in an OR scheduled for a liver resection.

“All you have is a hunch, not even your fellows support your diagnosis—” House turns back to glower at his fellows. Kutner raises an eyebrow but none of them jump to his defense. “—I’m not going to let you cut into this woman’s brain just because you ran out of ideas. Find another diagnosis,” she snaps.

“Come _on_ ,” House growls and she’s pretty sure that if he was able to, he’d be stamping his foot. “We’ve tried everything else—MRI, treatment—”

“You haven’t done an antibody test,” she interrupts.

“That’s—not—I don’t need to do the test if I can do the biopsy.”

“ _No_ ,” she enunciates loudly and clearly, and then turns to walk away. Sometimes the best way to deal with House is to let him fume for a while about how unfair she is so he can get it out of his system and come up with a less insane procedure. Besides, she’s already starting to get a headache just thinking about all the lawsuits that could come out of a botched brain biopsy.

But apparently, this isn’t one of those times, because House follows her down the hallway, his uneven steps not quite drowned out by her heels.

“Is this because I won’t sleep with you?” House yells after her at full volume, and Lisa realizes with a shiver of anger that this isn’t about the patient at all. This is a game, and House just wants to see her lose. “I realize it’s hard for you to resist the allure of my penis,” and people around them are stopping to stare now, “but just because you can’t control your emotions—”

“ _I’m saying no because you’re insane_ ,” she bellows, turning on her heel to face him. She can see a couple of nurses rolling their eyes at the nurses’ station and knows what they’re thinking: this is a scene that seems to play out constantly in the hospital. “No doctor in their right mind would allow this—the Board would have my head—”

“Oh, so you’re suddenly a doctor now?” House says in mock surprise. “I had no idea! Probably because you haven’t been a real doctor in a decade. This isn’t a difficult decision: all you have to do is say _yes_ and let the grown-ups do the doctoring.”

And right then, House reminds her of every asshole who has ever pissed her off, every guy who has ever made her feel inferior and dismissed her. She thinks of all the ways House has humiliated her over the years; the way he constantly undermines her; the way her own staff has come to expect her concessions to him.

“I’ve already made my decision,” she tells him coldly. “I’m not changing my mind just because you want to have some fun. I have responsibilities to the patients in this hospital, to the Board of Trus—”

“Right, the Board,” House sneers at her. “Try not to get carpet burn on your knees while you service them today, though I realize it’s an important part of your _responsibilities_.”

And that’s it. She snaps.

She swings her hand back and slaps him across the face, so hard that he stumbles sideways. She stalks up and leans right into his space.

“If you ever disrespect me like that again, _I will fire you_ ,” she hisses. “I don’t care how good of a doctor you are, I don’t care that you’ve got tenure, _I will find a way_. This is _my_ hospital, these are _my_ rules, got it?”

House looks at her for a long moment, hard-eyed, like he’s seeing her for the first time. Finally, he gives a sharp nod. “Yeah,” he says.

“Good,” she says, and walks away.

*

Rachel learns to laugh that night, when Lisa’s trying to put her to sleep with rhymes and endearments. When the lullabies don’t work, she decides to indulge Rachel’s playful mood and lies down in bed with her, kissing her fingers and tickling the bottom of her feet, making her kick and smile. Rachel is alight with happiness, pulling on her ear as she leans in to kiss her, poking her lips, her face, gripping the fabric of her shirt collar with tiny fingers. She can’t get enough of her curiosity and Lisa marvels at how the world must seem to her, everything new, with her mother at the center-point of her life.

She blows a gentle raspberry against Rachel’s plump belly, and Rachel laughs—just like that, the delighted giggle startling them both. Lisa has to do it again of course, just to hear the sound, and the pure, uncomplicated joy of it makes her laugh too. And then it makes her cry.

She thinks of this morning, of being stunned and shaken with rage, of the kind of world her daughter will be growing up in and wants to keep her safe, to protect her forever, though she knows she can’t.

“I’ll let you beat up any boys who pick on you,” she says to Rachel through her tears. “I’ll even teach you how.”

Rachel coos happily and pulls on Lisa’s hair with her strong, tiny hand.  
 

  



End file.
